Licensees of the Open Brand are not obliged to directly sell the products that they certify. They are required to ensure that the Certified Products are available in the marketplace. Licensees can therefore certify products that they market by reference to or by incorporation of third-party products.
This process does not in any way diminish the obligations imposed upon the licensee by the Trademark License Agreement; the obligations are the same as if the complete Certified Product were sold directly by the licensee. The licensee is therefore advised to have appropriate agreements with each third-party supplier.
The Open Brand applies to software products that conform to the Product
Standard in a defined hardware, or combined hardware-system software
environment (that is, the underlying hardware and any system software
necessary to allow the product to function). The relationships are
shown in
The supporting environment may be available in a variety of different realizations.
Where a series of environments are binary-compatible, the product may be certified in all of the series on the basis of a single test report and one Product Certification application. Additional members of a binary-compatible series may be added subsequently.
Identification of the binary-compatible family must be made in the Conformance Statement.
No strict rules are given by The Open Group as to what constitutes binary-compatibility, as it is architecture-specific, but note that the audit program may request the conformance of a Certified Product to be demonstrated on any appropriately configured member of a claimed binary-compatible family.
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